IELTS: 6.5 (with a minimum of 5.5 in each component)TOEFL (IBT): Overall score of 88 or above, with at least 21 in Listening and Writing, 22 in Reading and 23 in SpeakingCAE: 176 points overall with no component less than 162

Overview

Recordkeeping is as old as civilisation itself – indeed it has often been seen as a prerequisite for the development and organisation of communities and states. Today, effective records and information management is just as crucial; as technology continues to expand the potential for information creation and knowledge exchange, it’s vital to ensure that the knowledge and skills to manage those processes are available.

Records and information have to be managed in order to ensure that there is access to them for as long as required – and for a multiplicity of purposes and different kinds of users. Many of these uses lie in the future yet still have to be provided for: records created now may be need for research in a hundred and maybe a thousand years, just as records created a millennium ago are still used – and usable – today.

Records and archives research thus legitimately concerns any area of human activity. It might be described as comprising the investigation into, development of, professional methodologies, models, frameworks and standards, ethics and professional practice, user needs, roles and responsibilities, legal, compliance and governance issues, metadata, data integrity and exchange and preservation management.

Career opportunities

Programmes are designed to provide students with a wide range of transferable skills. Our vocational taught postgraduate programme, the Master of Archives and Records Management, has a highly successful record of employment with 90% of students in recent cohorts obtaining professional posts within six months of graduation. Successful doctoral students will be in a good position to benefit from the growth in demand for PhD qualifications in academic departments of archives, records and information management both in the UK and internationally, while specialist archives in particular will welcome practitioners with high-level expert knowledge and research skills.